New U2 album due later this year?

By Trent McMartin Mar 7, 2006, 17:18 GMT

It's been a month since U2 cleaned house at the 2006 Grammy Awards, winning five tropies including the 'Album of the Year' award for their album "How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb," but already talk has shifted to the possibility of the band releasing a brand new album later this year.

Though reports remain unsubstantiated, the band has dropped many hints over the past year or so on the interest of recording and releasing a brand new album. After U2's tour with hip-hop superstar Kanye West last year, lead singer Bono stated that the band will "experiment" with newly inspired ideas from hip-hop music, though it's unsure if this new "experimental" material would be included on an upcoming album.

In the January 2006 edition of Q Magazine, Bono said that the band was working on a new album for 2006, yet many expect the record to hit shelves in early 2007. In a December 2004 interview with Rolling Stone, Bono revealed that there were twenty-four songs that came out of the How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb sessions with only eleven of them making the cut -
leaving thirteen tracks unreleased.

Some of the rumoured songs to possibly appear on the next album include "North Star" - a song from the HTDAAB sessions; "Lead Me In The Way I Should Go" - first mentioned in the Feburary 2003 issue of Grammy Magazine; and "Mercy" - described in Blender magazine as "a six and a half-minute outpouring of U2 at its most uninhibitedly U2-ish."